The 8100 family of products was due to be launched in the June/July timeframe, but Wenceslao Lada, general manager and VP of the ProCurve business in the EMEA region, last week told ComputerWire that it is now earmarked for the fourth quarter.

Another source at the company said it should now be launched in September, adding that it slipped because we still need to do some more testing.

Meanwhile the Palo Alto, California-based company has unveiled its 9400 series family, described as a core interconnect routing switch. This is, under the hood, the BigIron MG8 product from Foundry, a 13U rack mount product offering 32 ports with 10Gb connectivity or 320 with GbE, competing with Cisco’s Catalyst 6509 with Supervisor 720 and Extreme’s BlackDiamond 10808.

As usual with HP ProCurve, the company is competing on price as well as functionality: it says a 20-port, 10Gb configuration costs $310,000, whereas the Cat6509 comes in at $383,000 and the BD10808, $471,000 for the same capacity.

On features and functionality, it claims to be ahead on the maximum number of wirespeed 10Gb ports (32 compared to the competitors’ 16), while it is on a par with the more expensive Extreme box in offering a year’s of next-business-day advance replacement, whereas Cisco offers just 90 days. It also comes with free lifetime upgrades to the software, whereas the competition typically charges for these, according to Jon Weatherall, ProCurve’s country manager for the UK and Ireland.

The first product out of the door in this family is the 9408sl. The Layer 3 switch-router is aimed at the enterprise rather than carrier market, with the scenarios for its use being connections to server farms running dual 10GbE uplinks and either GbE or 10GbE to the servers; a direct connection to a monolithic 10GbE server, or connecting to multiple switch routers in wiring closets over dual 10GbE links or trunked GbE links if they can’t talk directly over 10Gb.

The 9400 is, in a sense, ProCurve’s offering for the more conventional [i.e. Cisco] network, in which much of the intelligence resides in the core, whereas with the 8100 Series, when it arrives, it will propose a different architecture based on the intelligent edge concept.

In this world view, the intelligence is pushed out to the edge, leaving the devices at the core to perform a lot of the grunt work, in terms of sheer speed and bandwidth. For this reason the company as already launched access routers with considerable amounts of smarts for the branch office.

HP has also announced a number of free software upgrades. First were v2.0 of its free ProCurve Manager and the chargeable ProCurve Manager Plus consoles, featuring standards-based LLDP discovery of devices on the network (previous versions used more limited, SNMP-based discovery) as well as L2-L4 sFlow traffic analysis, which is overtaking XRMON as the preferred method of looking at traffic on a network.

Next was an upgrade to the software on the company’s 5300 switches, the primary innovation being the incorporation of the Virus Throttling technology developed by HP Labs to address DoS attacks, as well as per-port access control lists. Finally there is an update to the 420 Series single-radio wireless access point, which means a single AP can now support up to eight service set identifiers (SSIDs) where previously it could only support one.

This means that, to some extent, users may now be able to rely entirely on the single-radio AP from ProCurve rather than buying the more expensive dual-radio 520 Series, whose 802.11a radio enabled them to segment networks by radio frequency. Now they can do that within the same frequency, by using a different SSID.

This obviates the need for the 520 unless you specifically need 11a, Weatherall acknowledged.